OC3 Entertainment, the leader in audio-based facial animation technology, announces the much anticipated launch of FaceFX® 2015, a suite of tools for creating highly realistic lip-synchronization and facial animation data for immersive character-driven 3D games and simulations.

Facial animation has always presented a difficult challenge for game developers. Animating a 3D face by hand is prohibitively time-consuming and expensive. Performance capture technology helps, but companies specializing in these techniques can charge up to one hundred dollars per second of animation. Cumbersome recording requirements, specialized rigging, and a significant amount of “clean-up” prevent performance capture technology from reaching the economy of scale required by many games. At $100 per second, a game with ten hours of dialog that was localized into 6 languages would spend $21 million dollars on facial animation alone!

So how do games do it, you ask? For many of them, the answer is FaceFX®. Over the past decade, more than 250 game titles have been powered by this solution. Audio files created by voice actors are fed into the software, and realistic animation is created. The output data requires no clean-up, but can easily be tweaked to perfection using the high-powered FaceFX animation tools.

In FaceFX® 2015, support was added for Russian, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Polish to complement the existing languages which include English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, and Czech. Additionally, managing thousands of animations is streamlined with audio and text file version tracking and the ability to detect if animations have been hand-tweaked by artists. Finally, the ability to render movies from the free evaluation version of the software was added to encourage animators to get their characters talking with FaceFX® and share their work.

For more information about FaceFX® and OC3 Entertainment, please visit http://facefx.com

About FaceFX® FaceFX® is an advanced facial animation solution unique in its ability to liberate artists from the complexities of creating realistic dialogue and emotive characters. FaceFX® can be used to animate characters by hand or generate lip-synchronization and speech gesture data automatically from pre-recorded audio. FaceFX® can be integrated with any game engine or facial animation pipeline. For a list of games using FaceFX®, see http://facefx.com/game-titles